Weather Broadcasts

The faculty of the Department of Meteorology has always been strongly committed
to public service. By the late 1940s the public demanded more-sophisticated
weather information. In 1948, when the School's Meteorological Observatory
was receiving more than 2,500 phone calls a year for weather information,
a graduate student began a system of hoisting color-coded flags
atop the Mineral Industries Building to indicate upcoming conditions, a
procedure that continued for ten years. The increase in the number of households
with television brought new opportunities for public service weather forecasts,
and in1957 Dr. Charles Hosler began a daily broadcast
'Make Hay with Hosler' on WFBG- TV, Altoona. The importance and appeal of
such forecasts was emphasized unmistakably in the 1960s when the program
was suspended due to the lack of adequate equipment to receive facsimile
maps and forecasts directly from the National Meteorological Center in Washington,
D.C. A group of Pennsylvania farmers spontaneously collected about $2,500
and presented it to the University, requesting continuation of the television
forecasts. This effective demonstration by citizens had a great impact on
the University administration.

Support for public service
forecasting has grown, and the weather program in its various formats has
continued to increase in popularity to become the most widely viewed program
originated by the University. The program, now "Weather
World" under the guidance of Frederick J. Gadomski, Paul G. Knight and
Lee Grenci, is produced by the Penn State
Weather Communications Group, a joint venture of the departments of Meteorology,
Speech, and Learning and Telecommunications (which operates WPSX-TV for
Penn State). This fifteen-minute nightly show provides not only a comprehensive
weather forecast but also a wide variety of weather information. It is available
to half a million homes via Pennsylvania Public Television Network and Panorama,
an educational cable service.

The expanding public service function brought celebrity status to the university
forecasters, who received more and more requests to give lectures on aspects
of the weather to groups across the state. But this visibility was to have
its disadvantage, as Dr. Hosler learned when his extensive research program
on clouds, precipitation formation, and cloud-seeding
was misinterpreted as contributing directly to a severe drought in the 1960s.
The culmination of this unfortunate misconception was the enactment of state
legislation that effectively disabled all useful research on weather modification
at the University and brought to an abrupt end a valuable program of potential
benefit to Pennsylvania agriculture.